I have recollections of being a very small boy and staying with my grandmother in her little rented terraced house in Swalwell, the house my mother and her sister grew up in.

Three memories are very specific, the first being in the middle of her back room floor, sitting in a tin bath, it very warm at the front as I was facing the coal fire and my back freezing.

Reasonable assumptions can be made here to the effect that I am no longer as young as I used to be!

Secondly, she had an outside toilet which, in the winter, was not a nice place to be.

Those who remember Hurricane lamps will recall the pitiful light that they gave out, but I also remember the small blue and gold paraffin heater placed beside the toilet which my grandmother had bought under the misguided impression that it would give out enough heat to prevent the water in the lead pipes from freezing!

Thirdly, my brother and I used to help her bake but, as small boys are prone to do, not all of the flour went where it should have gone. She would throw a bucket of water onto the concrete Kitchen floor and sweep the mess out of the back door into the yard.

You may be thinking, what has this got to do with houses or, possibly, just how old is he!

Terraced houses and flats. Old offshoots. A lot of those houses were built with outside toilets and converted at a later date to provide a Bathroom inside. Unbelievable luxury!

Let’s deal with downstairs first and the Kitchen floors – an area of the house where water could be spilt.

They weren’t daft when they built these houses and when they put a concrete floor in the Kitchen it was because they figured that water spillages would occur and that wood would rot.

Those old concrete floors demonstrate two problems.

1. There was no damp proof membrane, which means that rising dampness comes up from the sub-soil and through the hardcore fill (if any) or soil on which the floor was laid.

2. The base material that the floor was laid on would often consolidate, create hollows beneath the surface and, over the years, the floors fracture and depressions appear in the surface where concrete drops to a lower level.

They’re no good in this condition and, if you’re buying and old house with the original concrete floor and if the surface is uneven, take my advice and get a builder in to hack it all up and re-lay with a new concrete floor incorporating a damp proof membrane.

As a Surveyor, I am fortunate that I know all of the risks and I have always replaced old concrete floors when they’ve been in place and as in condition as described.

Let’s look at Tyneside Flats now.

It was very common for the first floor flat to have a concrete surface laid onto what is, in effect, a normal joist supported tongued and grooved floorboard surface. The builders view was that the floor would get wet and floorboards would rot, so he put a concrete surface on top to deal with spillages.

There was also the point that water spillages were inevitable, anyway, and the concrete floor would stop the water passing directly through the floor and into the flat below. Very sensible, at the time!

That could have been 100 years ago, but the odd water spillage over a century, or maybe a leaking pipe, will have caused water penetration into the floorboards.

A few years ago an Estate Agent friend asked me to look at an upstairs flat he was thinking of buying as an investment and asked me to give it a “quick once over”. I told him that the offshoot floor surface was uneven, the concrete cracked and that I had a very strong suspicion that the floor was rotting.

You might think that he would have known better than to ignore my recommendations, but perhaps he thought that I was being over cautious (some chance!).

Three weeks after buying he rushed into my office in a blind panic telling me that the offshoot floor was rotten.

Tell me something I didn’t know!

I went out to have a quick look and, sure enough, the floor had had it, necessitating negotiations with the Leasehold owner of the ground floor flat to allow his contractor to take down the Kitchen and Bathroom ceiling below and then to replace the whole floor.

He had to pay for the work downstairs, as well as the work in his own flat, and have his Kitchen and Bathroom taken out and then put back in again.

The lessons here are:

a) Don’t think that buying a tin bath is going to be a fun orientated nostalgia trip.

b) Outside toilets will never come back into fashion.

c) Always be suspicious about concrete floors.

d) Trust your surveyors advice.